James Fallows

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His recent books Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009) are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book is China Airborne. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.

Tonight I won't be able to hear President Obama explain what he intends to do in Syria and elsewhere, and why. So rather than giving my reaction after the speech, let me give it before.

The magazine's cover eight years ago.

Eight years ago I did a cover story in The Atlantic called "Declaring Victory," whose central argument was that the United States could best protect itself against the worst long-term damage from terrorist movements by refusing to be whipsawed, baited, or panicked into self-destructive over-reaction. The piece began with a reference to Osama bin Laden that could as well be applied to the barbarous ISIS of today:

Osama bin Laden’s public statements are those of a fanatic. But they often reveal a canny ability to size up the strengths and weaknesses of both allies and enemies, especially the United States.... In his videotaped statement just days before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, bin Laden also boasted about how easy it had become for him “to provoke and bait” the American leadership: “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen … to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there.”

ISIS, apparently with a number of Western-convert members, is by all evidence even more sophisticated about manipulating the psychology of the democratic West. As applies to them, I stand by the logic and arguments of the counterterrorism experts I quoted all those years ago. They said:

That terrorists can certainly injure a country, but the most dangerous wounds are always self-inflicted, through over-reaction. (The war in Iraq killed many more Americans, had a vastly greater economic cost, and did incalculably more diplomatic and moral damage to our country than did the horrific attacks 13 years ago tomorrow.)

That when politicians, columnists, and cable TV guests are most fervent in urging a president to "do something!" about a threat, they most often have in mind a "something"—military attack—that cannot eliminate a terrorist movement, and that often creates more opposition and even terrorism in the long run. The measures that are most effective in undermining terrorism often have least to do with dramatic, highly publicized "kinetic" acts.

That when people say "we must act now!" they are usually wrong. Usually time is on the side of the stronger player, which in this case is us. Usually the greatest weapon of the underdog is the potential to panic and rattle the other side.

That when people say "we might look weak," usually it's time to discount whatever else they say. Looking weak has little to do with being weak. Every person, institution, and state has ultimate interests to defend and lines that can't be crossed. But the more worried you seem about "proving" strength whenever it is challenged, the weaker you look. Speak softly. Big stick.

That there is an asymmetry, to use a current term, in decisions about the use of violence. If you don't attack today, you can always attack tomorrow. But if you do attack today, you have foreclosed other choices for a long time to come. (Our options in 2014 and beyond are limited by the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.)

You don't have to believe me on this, though as I say I think the article stands up. But if you can't trust me, I hope you will believe David Frum, who is now a colleague at The Atlantic but who during the early George W. Bush years was (as he points out) helping to make the case for war with Iraq. In a wise item today on our site he says:

No matter how bad things, look, though, it’s always possible to make them worse. A war now against ISIS will do just that....

Frum rightly captures the standard congressional/op-ed/cable-news reflex in time of crisis:

Something must be done! This is something! Let’s do this!

Barack Obama's early and well-explained opposition to invading Iraq, which gave him the opening to beat Hillary Clinton and become president, reflected awareness of all these points about the paradoxes of weakness and strength, of deliberation and haste. Most of the time as president he has acted from the same principles—the obvious exception being his mistaken early approval of the ineffective "surge" in Afghanistan. I hope that in his ISIS remarks and policies he does not feel tempted to again prove that he is "tough."

The red circles show typical 30-mile-radius no-fly zones that accompany a president, in this case one centered on Martha's Vineyard and one over Otis Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. (FAA Sectional Chart)

I believe I am the only amateur pilot who’s a Democrat. Okay, I'm exaggerating. I can think of four others. No, five! Therefore when people in the aviation community talk about the effect of “Presidential TFRs”—the 30-mile-radius no-fly zones, known as Temporary Flight Restrictions, that travel with a president wherever he is—they often begin by saying, “Welcome to Obama's America ...” or “That idiot Obama has done it again...” The complaints started some other way between 2001 and 2009.

Politics apart, I give you this account from someone who flies the same kind of small propeller airplane as I do, but who happens to live in the vicinity of the Clinton-and-Obama-preferred summer vacation site of Martha’s Vineyard. He originally posted this on a pilots’ private-discussion board but agreed to its reposting here. I've added a few explanations of aviation lingo in brackets, [like this]. This person, who uses his plane to fly himself on business trips, writes:

I just spent the last two weeks living with the presidential TFR on Martha’s Vineyard. I flew through the TFR nearly every day, commuting to work and with other activities. Unlike past years, I did it mostly VFR, IFR days excepting, of course. [VFR is Visual Flight Rules, the clear-sky conditions in which pilots set their own courses. Under IFR, Instrument Flight Rules, pilots file flight plans in advance and must follow controllers' instructions on course, altitude, etc.]

In the past years when the president was on the Vineyard, I filed IFR every day to go through the outer ring. [The farther-out part of the the 30-mile-radius space, where you need prior approval to fly. The inner ring, usually with 10-mile radius, is much more tightly controlled.] That’s a major PITA, especially when it’s clear skies.

This year, on the first day of the TFR, I phoned Cape Approach [local Air Traffic Controllers, or ATC] and talked to one of the controllers and asked him what was the best way from their perspective and he said just to call Cape Clearance from Chatham on the ground (CQX [Chatham airport] is untowered) and get a squawk code and that would be fine. [Squawk code is a four-digit code you enter in the plane's transponder, which lets controllers watching radar screens know which plane is which.] Cape Approach’s perspective was that if you are squawking a code and talking to them, you are fine in the outer ring ...

In the interest of caution and even though I had been given the guidance from Cape Approach, I diligently followed the NOTAM [Notice to Airmen, the equivalent of "now hear this" bulletins] and filed and activated a VFR flight plan every day from Foreflight [a popular and excellent iPad-based flight planning program] when flying VFR.

Some observations:

1. VFR flight plans are useless for the TFR. [A VFR flight plan is mainly useful as a search-and-rescue safeguard, so people know where you were intending to go and when, if you don't show up.] Boston Approach stated as much when he alluded to “entering you in the system” as I was picking up flight following on the way home one day. I told him I had a VFR flight plan open, if that saved him some work and he responded to the effect that it wasn’t enough. You need to be in “the system” [in the system = filing identifying info for the plane and pilot, along with intended route and timing for this specific flight, in the ATC system] and added “you don’t want to mess with them”....

2. Controllers get as nervous as we do. I wonder if there are Secret Service or others sitting in the ATC facility? ATC gets extremely nervous when the president is on the move. At one point, he left the Vineyard and went back to D.C. for a day and this started another TFR centered on Otis (FMH), and creates lots of uncertainty, since he is rarely on time and the TFR times drift. [The image at the top shows airspace when both TFRs are in effect.] I knew this was happening and planned to avoid the FMH inner 10 mile ring already. The controller was very jumpy, asked me my heading and told me he would advise. I let him know I was “direct GAILS [a GPS navigation point], if that helps” which kept me outside the ring. He said “Thank you” and never bothered me again, after an audible exhale.

3. Lots of pilots are clueless. At one point, ATC asked me if I had a visual on somebody low and slow, squawking 1200. [1200 is the transponder code for planes flying visually and not necessarily talking with controllers. Planes inside the TFR should not be using this code.] I never saw him, but I did see the flash of sunlight off the wings of the orbiting F-16’s from miles out as they turned to investigate. I never heard what happened. Lots of pilots stumble into the area unaware of the TFR. How can this be? There were too many forehead-smacking moments as I listened to the daily dance. We as pilots have to do better.

4. Actually going to the Vineyard (MVY) [MVY is Vineyard Haven airport, on the island] inside the inner ring is a “whole 'nuther thing”. Yesterday, we went to visit friends who were staying on the Vineyard, and rather than take the ferry for 90 minutes, I decided we would just fly. Made the reservation at Hyannis with the TSA, per the NOTAM and made the 4-minute flight to HYA from CQX [Chatham to Hyannis] for our “check.”

Wow, what an employment spectacle that was. We were directed to a holding area and a bus was sent to pick us up, after waiting in the plane for some time. The plane was fully unloaded of luggage and we and our bags were taken to a temporary screening area where the bags were searched by hand. We were all frisked/wanded. My plane was inspected by another person. I gave pertinent information to others seated with laptops, who were talking to ATC and passing the approvals on. Eventually, they determined that the duffel bags of lunches, sweatshirts, frisbees, and suntan lotion posed a low security risk.

An hour after landing, we were loaded back on the bus and dropped at the plane to repack it, and get started again for the 10-minute flight from HYA to MVY. [Hyannis to Vineyard Haven.] How to make a 15-minute flight into 2 hours? With the TSA, anything is possible. In the end, the screening experience left me disappointed that I had to go to such great lengths to fly my airplane within 10 miles of another fellow citizen on my way to the beach. We, as a nation, are very afraid of airplanes. Sigh.

5. ATC were great to work with throughout. They were absolute professionals.

6. The amount of hardware and manpower mobilized to support this vacation are incredible. I flew out of the Vineyard last night at 10pm after the TFR had been lifted and saw the exodus of all the supporting cast. Multiple C-5’s taking off for Andrews, two Ospreys, four F-16’s, Coast Guard and State Police helicopters, and more. It was breathtaking and concerning.

There are multiple businesses that are effectively shut down during the vacation TFR. There is a skydiving outfit at Marston Mills that is in the outer ring, along with some banner towing that stops operations. More impacted are the businesses on the Vineyard. The usual weekend line of planes landing for breakfast on the Vineyard are gone, for sure, but the biggest hit is the grass airfield at Katama. There is a great breakfast place there, bi-plane rides and across the road is the open beach of the Atlantic. Katama hosts dozens of planes on any given summer day. That entire thing shuts down. I wonder if the restaurant owners, bi-plane operator, skydiving businesses, FBO's etc. are compensated? It's a huge hit for these businesses at what is basically prime time of the summer vacation on Cape Cod.

Life on the Cape has returned to normal. Until next year.

There is a larger, stricter, and permanent version of these controls sitting over Washington, D.C. airspace all the time. Presidential campaign season is a nightmare for the air-traffic system, because rolling no-fly zones accompany the incumbent president (and sometimes smaller ones for challengers) during campaign travels. Here is what an Obama bus trip in the industrial Midwest did to airspace two years ago:

The big red circles in Michigan and Ohio were for currently active TFRs. The yellow circles were for ones about to go into effect. The big red one over D.C. is the permanent zone there. The little yellow one just above it is Camp David. Here is a post from a pilot who was flying at the time of that TFR.

I am not making a sweeping policy point here. As far as policy points go, anyone who knows the history of the 1960s understands that it is genuinely important to protect presidents from threat of mortal harm. (How would the history of that era differed if John F. Kennedy had stayed in office? Or a century earlier, if Abraham Lincoln had?) Anyone who knows America understands why Barack Obama has required even more protection than most of his predecessors. I am very glad the Secret Service has done its job as effectively as it has.

Instead this is offered as a specimen of the operating realities of our security state—many of which persist precisely because they don't come to public attention. Are these 60-mile-wide shutdowns the least obtrusive way of realizing the legitimate national goal of protecting a president? They seem excessive to me, though of course I'm biased. But the next time some president asks me for advice on where to summer, I'll suggest: Look for a place that won't snarl life and shut down business for millions of people who happen to live there. Maybe even a place like ... the outskirts of Waco?

The stormtrooper look by law enforcement in Missouri has usefully brought into focus the long-term trend of police forces morphing into military units. For previous installments and a reading list, see here and here.

Today's photo, courtesy of Michael Vosburg of the Fargo, N.D. Forum, is of a police team six months ago, in the winter. The photo is worth a second look, for details ranging from the vehicle's license plate to the choice of green camouflage in the snow.

The full story, by Archie Ingersoll, is also worth reading. It points out that the last big public disturbance in the Fargo area was 13 years ago, during the Testicle Festival. (I'll let you look it up.) Oddities like the Testicle Festival are part of the picture we'd like to have of Americana. Combat-dressed cops are not, or shouldn't be. Usefully, the Forum article ends with a sane observation from the police chief of Moorhead, Minnesota, which is Fargo's sister city across the Red River:

[F]ear is a factor police have to be mindful of when dealing with disorderly crowds, said Moorhead Police Chief David Ebinger. When officers don intimidating riot gear, their appearance alone can stir trouble.

“If you show up with that gear and you don’t have a riot, you’re inviting one,” he said. “The best weapon we have is our ability to communicate.”

There's a fascinating parallel here between police officers and teachers. Police body cameras and test scores serve the same purpose. They are meant to provide accountability, assessment, and motivation for the core interaction between a public servant and the public served.

American political power at all levels has determined that a tortured, inaccurate, funhouse mirror statistical approximation of a teacher's interaction with a student is absolutely vital to public well-being and worthy of billions and billions of tax dollars.

Meanwhile, it is controversial—and maybe too expensive—to provide a precise, direct accounting of the core interaction between a police officer and the public. That is, to be direct, completely nuts.

Think about it: in the eyes of American state power, teaching Mike Brown makes the teacher immediately suspect and open to public sanction based on Mike Brown's test scores. Shooting Mike Brown in the street and leaving his body uncovered for four hours makes Mike Brown automatically suspect in the eyes of state power.

A camera provides for police the holy grail that education reformers seek for teachers—the ultimate evidence of policing quality. How would such evidence have changed what happened in Ferguson?

More from Townsend on his own site, here. Thanks to reader JW for the Forum tip.

Update If you would like an illustration of Townsend's point about the difference that photographic evidence can make, consider this cellphone video of police shooting to death Kajieme Powell yesterday.

If you haven't yet seen it, please read this Storify account, by Kelsey Atherton, of how veterans of real combat—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—view today's wildly over-militarized American police. For instance:

A reader on the East Coast responded to my post last night, which said that perhaps the scenes of stormtroopers among us would startle the public into realizing how far this security-state trend had gone. This reader, S.C., suggests a contrasting visual cue:

Maybe you’re right to conjecture that police-state images might horrify the country into restoring good sense about cops in combat gear, riding in tanks on streets. Here’s a thought about that. It’s not new, but it might be worth mentioning.

I’ve pasted in an image [shown at the top of this post] that may fit slantwise with your insight. It’s not what you meant, but it conveys the message in a country that still likes seeing if calm wisdom and brains can head off any need for ostentatious official bellicosity. From the old and much-loved The Andy Griffith Show, it’s Sheriff Andy Taylor, who spurns sidearms in police work, and whose face expresses all that needs to be said about Deputy Barney Fife’s comically enthusiastic wanna-be militarism.

I love it that Sheriff Taylor always allowed Deputy Fife to carry only one bullet, and required him to keep it in his pocket. Maybe you’ll want to keep this photo in yours, in case it’s needed (and assuming it’s not already there).

It’s unrealistic, of course, to try too hard to map this half-century-old sitcom onto present problems. But it’s also unwise not to recall what Sheriff Taylor stood for, and not to recognize the extent of the country’s respect for it.

Agreed. On that same theme, here is a clip from an episode of The Andy Griffith Show 50 years ago, in 1964, in which Barney Fife has a different helmet but the same enthusiasm for dress-up military gear.

That gentle, dismissive, pretense-puncturing humor—something I associated with Andy Griffith in my childhood and that my parents did with Will Rogers in theirs—doesn't have an exact current counterpart, or not one I can think of just now. Stephen Colbert is closer than Jon Stewart; in his earliest, funny-rather-than-angry days, Rush Limbaugh could sound this way. Among politicians, Ronald Reagan was actually good at it—"There you go again!"—as was John F. Kennedy in some of his press conferences. It's an effect Barack Obama strains for and sometimes achieves, for instance when poking fun at the latest Birther-style claim. (And yes, before you point it out, I'm aware that in an actual small Southern town 50 years ago, the real-world counterparts of Andy Taylor and Barney Fife would have been enforcing segregation laws.)

We would like to think that such level-headed, amused BS-detection is part of our national cast of mind. A Yank at Oxford! The Duke and the King in Huckleberry Finn! The Tweet shown above, by @BFriedmanDC, may offer a glimmer of hope for its reappearance. It is the kind of comment Sheriff Andy Taylor might have made if he had seen legions of Barney Fifes dressed for war.

The images from Missouri of stormtrooper-looking police confronting their citizens naturally raises the question: how the hell did we get to this point? When did the normal cops become Navy SEALs? What country is this, anyway?

There will be more and more mainstream coverage of the modern militarization of the police, a phenomenon mainly of the post-9/11 years. For reference/aggregation purposes, here is a guide to further reading:

1) The Book on this topic: Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko. It came out a year ago and is more timely now than ever.

2) "Lockdown Nation," a Peter Moskos review of Balko's book last year in PS magazine.

6) Update: An important and well-illustrated report by Matt Apuzzo in the NYT two months ago, called "War Gear Flows to Police Departments."

7) Update^2: A new report from Alec MacGillis in TNR on how "anti-terrorist" funding from DHS has equipped police forces with this CENTCOM-style war gear.

This Ferguson, Missouri episode is obviously about race, and is (another) occasion for pointing readers to Ta-Nehisi Coates's powerful "Reparations" article. It is also about how we govern ourselves, and about how far the ramifying self-damage of the post-9/11 era has gone.

"Self-damage"? All the literature about terrorism emphasizes that the harm directly done in an attack is nothing compared with the self-destructive reactions it can induce. From Fallujah to Ferguson, that is part of what we're seeing now.

I won't belabor that theme for the moment but will say: Perhaps these incredible police-state-like images will have some attention-focusing or "enough!" effect, like their counterparts from another era (below). Meanwhile, check out Balko's book.

I have received lots of mail on the technical aspects of the "Iron Dome" system: its origin, performance, strengths, and potential weaknesses, plus comparisons with its Patriot predecessors. Watch this space for follow-ups as more information becomes known.

But I intend this to be the last installment on the string begun with the powerful note from an American rabbi in Jerusalem, about his gratitude for Iron Dome protection as Hamas rockets were falling. I have received enough mail since then to be reminded that there is an inexhaustible supply of passionate but irreconcilable, and familiar, statements of who is "more to blame" for the escalating violence and who originally wronged whom.

For a sobering example, consider this recent CNN exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Israeli Economics Minister Naftali Bennett. I have heard from people in Israel, America, and Europe who say that Bennett is speaking tough, plain, necessary truths. I have heard from others in those same places who think, as I do, that Bennett sounds appallingly callous about other people's loss of life—in this case, the deaths of the four little boys on the beach. Wolf Blitzer himself seems taken aback by what he is hearing. It's worth noting that Bennett features this clip on his own YouTube site.

I know that Bennett is not "representative," and that his fiercest critics are within Israel itself. I can name lots of American public figures I agree with even less. I know that there are plenty of people in the region and elsewhere who hatefully urge death to Israelis or Jews. But I mention this video because watching it reminded me, through its absence, of the quality of moral breadth, compassion, and bravery that distinguishes people willing to take risks for peace.

As a young staffer on the periphery, I saw this quality from both Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at the Camp David negotiations in 1978 (not to mention Jimmy Carter's role, as recently portrayed by my friend Lawrence Wright in the play Camp David). The lasting tragedy of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination (like Sadat's) is that he also had great courage and breadth, and unassailable credentials as a patriot who was strong enough to compromise. I am no one's idea of a Middle East expert, but I see no such figures on any side now.

With that, two further messages about the political and social ramifications of Iron Dome, both from people in Jerusalem.

First, from a woman who agrees with the rabbi:

I have lived in Israel for 21 years and in Jerusalem for the past 14. I long for peace and would vote tomorrow to give up the West Bank and Gaza for a Palestinian state that would accept the existence of Israel and live in real peace with us.

I (literally) cry over the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians. But your reference to "rocket exchanges" obscures the fact that the Hamas - an Islamic terrorist group whose stated goal is to drive out (or worse) the Jews living in the entire territory of Israel - including the area within the Green line - started firing rockets at Israeli civilians and Israel's response was defensive. You can argue about the intensity of the response, but not about the need for a response and a forceful one.

As for Iron Dome, I too am grateful to all who designed, funded, built and operated it and I know that the Hamas leaders are in luxury hotels in Doha and Cairo or in underground bunkers while they leave their people exposed to Israeli air strikes.

When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians.

Now, from Dr. Hillel Ben Sasson of Jerusalem, who has explicitly asked me to identify him. ("I indeed wish to be mentioned by name, as I believe in the veracity of my claims and am willing to defend them.") He is director of programs for Molad, an Israeli think tank.

His message is personally very critical of the rabbi, which I know will be wounding. But since I have kept his (the American rabbi's) identity confidential, and since Dr. Sasson is taking responsibility for his critical views by name, and mainly since his statement is so powerfully argued, it seems fair to give him his say.

Hillel Ben Sasson writes:

Reading the words of the anonymous rabbi in recounting his fear in face the warning sirens alerting Jerusalemites of Hamas rockets, I was both enraged and ashamed.

I was enraged by the lack of comprehension he showed to the situation in which we - Israelis and Palestinians - have been living for as long as we remember. I was born in Jerusalem in 1979 and lived here for most of my life. An officer in the IDF still fulfilling my reserve duty, I have lived through three wars (Lebanon I - 1982; Gulf I - 1991; Lebanon II - 2006), two Intifada uprisings of the occupied Palestinians (1987; 2000) and three military operations in Gaza (Cast Lead - 2008; Pillar of Defense - 2012; Protective Edge - 2014). Some of these I experienced in uniform. I am also raising two young children in Jerusalem.

For us living here, the current military operation and the ongoing drizzle of rockets are neither unbearable nor threatening in an existential way. Iron Dome has enabled Israelis to continue with their normal lives neither terrified nor terrorized. While the Gazans are rained with high-precision ton-heavy bombs falling with no sirens or alert system, we in Jerusalem have heard three sirens in the past nine days, and witnessed no rocket falling.

When the siren went off in that Saturday afternoon mentioned by the rabbi, I was sitting with my family in a park right across to the Shalom Hartman Institute, compared in his narrative to an U-Boat under attack. From the park where we were picnicking, as it happened, I could see the rocket being intercepted several miles south to Jerusalem, above Hebron, and in contrast to the rabbi's Dresdenian depiction.

In a cross check with a senior Haaretz correspondent, it turns out that none of the rockets even got close to central Jerusalem - hits were located only around Hebron and Ramat Raziel (a village miles to the west of the city) probably a result of shrapnel from Iron Dome's interceptions. This gets nowhere near WWII (the very comparison is preposterous if not offensive to survivors of that terrible war).

I am enraged because the rabbi is presumably a tourist in my city and country, yet in the name of his spiritual and cultural connection to the holy land he feels free to act as its spokesman. By generalizing his personal sense of fear and acting as a spokesman for those who actually carry the burden of living in Israel, the rabbi grossly exaggerated the impact of Hamas terror on Jerusalem and portrayed it with unduly epic dimensions. In so doing, he distorts the actual power imbalance in this tragic situation, in addition to victimizing me and my fellow Israeli citizens.

As a society, we are a (powerful) side in this conflict, not a helpless victim. To avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to clarify that I am far from disregarding the fear and anxiety felt by many Israelis who are in the line of fire day after day. Writing about Jerusalem however - a city that witnessed three sirens and not even one hit of a rocket - in the way that the rabbi adopted is simply absurd. This absurdity might indicate that his experience is influenced less by concrete reality and more by his already existing perception of victimhood. And this brings me to shame.

The blinding victimhood embodied in the rabbi's comments is shameful because it points at an abject moral, spiritual and leadership failure. In the very same Jerusalem and on the very same days, young religious Jews have burnt alive an innocent Palestinian teenager, in the name of national revenge. In this very city, racist Jewish hooligans are marching every night, seeking Arab scapegoats, cracking down on other Jews who dare answer back to them, shouting slogans such as "death to the Arabs" and "A Jew has a Soul, and Arab is a son of a whore".

Where is the cry of this anonymous rabbi against these far more worrisome threats to our existence and future? How dare American rabbis who keep silent these days continue and call themselves religious shepherds? As an observant Jew, I am ashamed at how few were the courageous voices who took into heart the words of Rabbi A. J. Heschel who marched at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr.: "Few might be guilty - but all are responsible".

The rabbi's anonymity, it turns out, is but a metaphor for his inacceptable silence on the real enemies of the Jewish society in Israel - the extremist hateful enemies from within.

No, rabbi, you got it wrong. The rockets are not really scary nor are they a true existential threat. Racism, radicalism, and religious intoxication from brute power has become an imminent danger to our old and beloved peoplehood. When people are accustomed to hearing that they are perpetual innocent victims of Palestinian aggression, they eventually translate they frustration into rage and start seeking justice in revenge. If you continue looking up to the sky, you will not notice that the house is already burning from within.

[Please see twoupdates below.] Many crucial questions about the tragic/disastrous apparent shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines flight in Ukraine are still unanswerable. Who did it? Why? With what warning? Or repercussions?

But at this point one question can be answered: Did aviation authorities know that this was a dangerous area?

Yes, they most certainly did. Nearly three months ago, on the "Special Rules" section of its site, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration put out an order prohibiting American pilots, airlines, charter carriers, and everyone else over whom the FAA has direct jurisdiction, from flying over southern parts of Ukraine.

Here is how the "who this applies to" part of FAA NOTAM 4/7677 looked, in the ALL-CAPS typeface of many FAA communications and in the language the FAA uses to say "this means YOU!"

A. APPLICABILITY.
THIS SPECIAL FEDERAL AVIATION REGULATION (SFAR) APPLIES TO THE FOLLOWING PERSONS:

1) ALL U.S. AIR CARRIERS AND U.S. COMMERCIAL OPERATORS;

(2) ALL PERSONS EXERCISING THE PRIVILEGES OF AN AIRMAN CERTIFICATE ISSUED BY THE FAA, EXCEPT SUCH PERSONS OPERATING U.S. REGISTERED AIRCRAFT FOR A FOREIGN AIR CARRIER; AND

(3) ALL OPERATORS OF U.S. REGISTERED CIVIL AIRCRAFT, EXCEPT WHERE THE OPERATOR OF SUCH AIRCRAFT IS A FOREIGN AIR CARRIER.

And here is how the "these are the areas to stay out of" part of the order was written, everything specified as Longitude/Latitude coordinates:

(D), NO PERSON DESCRIBED IN PARAGRAPH (A) MAY CONDUCT FLIGHT OPERATIONS IN THE PORTION OF THE SIMFEROPOL (UKFV) FIR WITHIN THE FOLLOWING LATERAL LIMITS: 454500N 0345800E-460900N 0360000E-460000N 0370000E-452700N 0364100E-452242N 0364100E-451824N 0363524E-451442N 0363542E-451218N END PART 1 OF 4. 23 APR 22:30 2014 UNTIL 1504270001. CREATED: 23 APR 22:16 2014

Until only a few years ago, most FAA notices—of restricted air space, of special weather hazards, of other areas-of-concern—were promulgated in this same indecipherable Long/Lat form. Now the FAA distributes most information on U.S. airspace via easily understandable graphical overlays. For instance, its Special Use Airspace site, which you are supposed to check before every flight, gives you a color-coded illustration of all active military airspace, restricted zones, etc, at any given time. Here is how part of it looks right now, mainly showing active "Military Operations Areas" in the South. This is a screen shot, but on the real map you can click on each one to see its vertical limits. For instance, those large ones over northeastern Mississippi go from 8,000 feet upward, so we were able to fly under them in our recent visits to the "Golden Triangle" cities in the same area.

I have not yet seen a map that plots the Long/Lat points of the Ukraine no-fly order onto the route the Malaysian plane flew, and where it was apparently shot down. When I learn of one, I will provide an update. (Credit to Jad Mouawad of NYT for seeing this notice before I did.)

UPDATE This FAA notice appears to apply mainly to Crimea and the areas immediately to its north, all of which are south of the reported crash zone. So this rule would apparently not have prevented flights over the exact area of the crash, but it certainly was a sign of a general trouble zone. Thanks to Joel Koepp and other readers for plotting out the Long/Lat readings.

The point for the moment: the FAA "Special Rules" section tells U.S. pilots and aircraft not to fly over trouble spots ranging from North Korea to Yemen to Syria to Iraq. And since last April it has told them not to fly over certain parts of Ukraine.

Update-update Thanks to readers who have pointed me to another, later NOTAM, which warned planes about hazards in broader areas of Ukraine, apparently including those the Malaysian airliner flew across. The hazard this NOTAM warned against was possibly conflicting Air Traffic Control instructions from Russian and Ukrainian controllers. A sample of that NOTAM is shown below, with text here. For more information, try this site.

"I found it very troubling that you sought to create a perception of parity between my experience and perspective and the death of Palestinian innocent civilians." More from the American rabbi in Jerusalem.

Last night I posted three reactions from people in Jerusalem to debates about the effectiveness of the "Iron Dome" air-defense system. The first, longest, and most detailed was from an American rabbi who has been in Israel during the latest exchanges of fire. He reported on the stoically tense mood inside a Jerusalem bomb shelter, which he likened to a scene from a WW II submarine movie in which the crew waited out depth charges without knowing when one might hit. He also described tender scenes of parents trying to protect their children.

After quoting his message, I said that from past correspondence I knew the writer to be a person of broadly universalistic, rather than narrow, human sympathies. Although he had sent his note before the latest horror of the four Palestinian boys killed while playing on the beach, I said that I knew he must be aware of the fear and grief on both sides—with the great disproportion of the recent death and grieving occurring among the Palestinians.

This morning I got two notes from Americans in the region. First, from the rabbi himself, who objected to my comments. I quote him in full:

I was taken aback by your juxtaposition of my comment to your reporting of the deaths of the Palestinian children the next day. Those deaths were beyond horrible and tragic. But I found it very troubling that you sought to create a perception of parity between my experience and perspective and the death of Palestinian innocent civilians on the other.

The death of those innocents lies at the feet of Hamas who began this terror offensive and continued it despite the Israeli government's agreement to adhere to a cease fire.

If Hamas had not begun to fire indiscriminately thousands of rockets at Israeli cities (and Palestinian ones like Bethlehem and Hebron, and even at its own power electric power station on the Strip), if it had not filled its hundred of underground tunnels with rockets and other munitions instead of using them to provide shelter to its citizens, if it had not encouraged it residents to remain in their homes and not to seek shelter after they received "knocks" text and cell calls from the IDF warning of an impending attack, if Hamas eschewed to the very same Jewish doctrine of the sanctity of life that Islam adopted from Judaism, then those precious, innocent lives and the other precious, Palestinian lives would not have been lost. But the loss of life will continue because of Hamas' warped death theology, and the more you and other commentators continue to perpetuate the "cycle of violence" narrative, the more they and other terrorists will believe that their approach is an effective one.

The other note is from another American who has lived and worked outside the United States for many decades and in the Middle East for several years. He says:

Thanks for your comment after the transcript of the rabbi's thoughts, that similar things are happening in Gaza and the Gaza folks don't enjoy the same weaponry as the Israelis.

I have a few Israeli sympathizers among my friends who rant and rage about the "terror" from the Palestinians but don't acknowledge that there is "terror" also from Israel toward their subjects in Gaza and West Bank. It's nice to see when writers can show a balanced (but not "false equivalent") perspective on this mess.

"I am very grateful for the Israeli 'know how' that created it, the effective AIPAC lobbying that ensured its funding, and the Congressional and Presidential support that made it available to the citizens of Israel." So writes an American rabbi from a bomb shelter in Jerusalem.

On Wednsday I contrastedThe WashingtonPost's front-page story about Israel's "Iron Dome" protective system—"Highly Effective Missile Defense," as the headline put it—with much more skeptical coverage from tech-oriented publications like Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Technology Review.

I said that I didn't know which view was right, but that there was a very long record of high-tech military systems being hailed in immediate reports that were later deflated or debunked. One famous illustration involves the Patriot anti-missile system during the first Gulf War. While the fighting was underway, the Patriots were said to have knocked as many as 80 percent of Iraqi Scud missiles out of the sky. A careful congressional investigation after the war lowered the "strongest evidence" kill rate down to 9 percent. (More info here, from Frontline.)

So perhaps Iron Dome will end up seeming as impenetrably effective as immediate heat-of-battle reports have claimed it to be. Perhaps not. For the moment, a range of reader reactions from Israel and elsewhere.

1) "If you save one life, it is as if you have saved an entire world." From an American rabbi now in Israel:

I have been in Israel since before the Hamas terror offensive began. I was caught outside when the first azaka (Red Alert siren) went off in Jerusalem. And I have also made a run for the miklat (bomb shelter) in the apartment building where I am living when the siren sounded on a Sabbath afternoon.

On one occasion, I was walking to the Shalom Hartman Institute for a meeting when the siren sounded while I was just a few feet from the Institute's gated entrance. A father walking with his very young son on the street panicked as the siren went off. I called and waved to him to follow me into the Institute. I ran, along with faculty, administrators, and participants in a Hillel Directors program to the bomb shelter located underneath the Institute's Beit Midrash (study hall where over the years thousands of Rabbis, Jewish educators and lay people from around the world have studied). All the while, I could hear the breath of that father as he ran behind me holding his son in his arms.

Within the bowels of the bomb shelter we could hear the Iron Dome missiles intercepting the Hamas rockets overhead. The scene was reminiscent of what you might recall from motion pictures about life in a WWII U-boat or submarine when depth charges are dropped from a above and the booms of their explosions sound like they could rattle the teeth out of your head. We counted with our lips and fingers . . . One . . Two . . . Three.

In all, five rockets where fired into densely populated Jerusalem. Three were destroyed over our neighborhood and within half a mile of where we were (when we emerged topside we could see the white wisps that remained from the Iron Dome missiles). Two more Hamas rockets were allowed to fall in an empty field adjacent to the neighborhood of Arnona. Had there been no Iron Dome those rockets would have landed in the midst of apartments buildings, houses, schools, and parks.

My religious tradition claims that if you save one life, it is as if you have saved an entire world. So, as one of thousands who are now living with the threat of terror from the skies, I am interested little in the academic/ theoretical musings related to the so-called ineffectiveness of the system. I am very grateful for the Israeli "know how" that created it, the effective AIPAC lobbying that ensured its funding, and the Congressional and Presidential support that made it available to the citizens of Israel.

Best wishes from Jerusalem,

The rabbi sent this note before the horrific recent episode of four little boys, ages 9 through 11, being killed by Israeli shelling as they played on a Gaza beach. I have corresponded often enough with this reader over the years to know that he means his "if you save one life" thoughts to be universal rather than sectarian. So I am sure he understands that there are also fathers and mothers in Gaza holding their little children in their arms—and that because of differences in offensive weaponry, defensive systems (including Iron Dome), and other factors, vastly more of those Palestinian families have been killed through the rocket exchanges. (According to the NYT as I write, so far 214 deaths in Gaza during the recent violence, and 1 in Israel.)

2) Proximity fuse does the job. From another person in Jerusalem, who starts out with an exchange I quoted between Ted Postol and Robert Siegel on All Things Considered.

"SIEGEL: As I understand it, for it to work it actually has to hit an oncoming rocket head on.

POSTOL: That's correct. "

Actually, I strongly suspect that Siegel - and Postol for that matter - are incorrect, quite incorrect.

To the best of my knowledge the Tamir interceptor uses a proximity fuse such that it only has to get "close enough" (and I don't know how that is defined) for it to detonate and destroy the incoming rocket. As to its overall effectiveness, a crude, but useful measure is how much damage from Hamas rockets is actually occurring on the ground.

In this campaign Hamas has fired far more rockets, and more powerful rockets, than in the previous two, and more critically, more rockets into areas of greater population and building density, most notably metro Tel Aviv. In addition, Hamas has been firing many more simultaneous salvos which increase the likelihood of a hit in a dense region like Metro Tel Aviv. Nonetheless, there has been far less damage than in the previous two Hamas campaigns. One would not expect this result if the Iron Dome effectiveness were in the 5% or even 20% or even 50% range.

The original allegations that Iron Dome is a sham or near-sham came from an Israeli anti-missile systems expert (or perhaps "expert") who, in the aftermath of "Pillar of Defense", dreamed up all kinds of criteria of marginal relevance (I don't recall the details) to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the Iron Dome system. He was responded-to by the developers of Iron Dome, within the limits of the understandable secrecy surrounding the details of the system's performance (any defensive system has its weak points and you don't want to inform your enemy what are those weak points). In addition, there is a "sour grapes" aspect to this. Way back when, this original Israeli critic had submitted his own proposal for developing an anti-rocket interception system but his proposal was turned down.

Finally, with all due respect to the experts cited in the various sources you cited, they are judging the system from a great distance, with a lot of assumptions and missing a lot of info, unless they are privy to secret IDF Iron Dome performance data. And somehow or another, I am skeptical that they are on the distribution list for those memos.

3) "I was skeptical. Until last week." From one more reader in Jerusalem:

I live in Israel and was very skeptical of the ability of the Iron Dome system. Like you write, the military establishment likes to tout and over rate themselves to impress the possible enemy. That was until last week.

I live in Jerusalem and was going to check for mail when I heard the sirens, so instead of going to a shelter like an intelligent person, I went to see if anything was flying. I looked up and saw two rocket coming towards my location. So instead of running I took out my camera and before I could take a picture, I saw two poofs, no sound, just poofs like a pillow opening up in midair. (I heard the booms about 20 seconds later.)

I was totally amazed by the ability of the Iron Dome to take out the rockets, there were actually 4 not the two that I originally thought I saw.

4) "All about convincing Israelis that their government is doing the job." On the other hand, from a reader not in Jerusalem:

I'm probably super-cynical about anything I read in the mainstream media about Israel, but the Iron Dome stuff is, in my view, all about convincing Israelis that their government is in fact doing the job they desire.

I'm sure you know, this, but in the past 75 or so years the success of most military campaigns (and often new technologies) has, with careful retrospective study, proved to have been grossly overstated. [JF note: Agreed.]

I can't recall the details perfectly, but the Serbian-Bosnian turmoil was supposedly brought to a conclusion by the introduction of a USAF?NATO bombing campaign. Post-conflict NATO expended considerable effort to quantify the accuracy and impact of the bombing campaign, and they in fact concluded that the bombing campaign had been almost entirely ineffective. This conclusion flew in the face of what USAF wished to believe, and not surprisingly it worked long and hard to ensure the NATO conclusions were discredited and/or buried.

As a country that enjoys such a tight, emotionally-inflammable relationship with the US, Israel and its American affiliates (for lack of a better word) will paint whatever picture most effectively advances its cause, facts be damned. It's interesting that the US just committed another $500 million to Israel's Iron Dome program. How we reconcile that whilst simultaneously working hard to erode social programs escapes me.

In its lead story this morning, the WaPo tells us that Israel's famous "Iron Dome" air defense system has been a huge technical success that has changed the realities of battle. The system, for the record, was developed in Israel, is produced by U.S. and Israeli contractors, and is mainly funded by the United States.

“I can’t even explain with words how great it is,” said Sivan Hadad, 32, who has lived her entire life in Ashkelon and had grown accustomed to staying indoors when the rockets started flying. “Now I can go out. I still get scared, but not like before.”

To Israeli security officials, the success of Iron Dome is akin to that of the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank, which they say helped bring an end to an onslaught of suicide bombings in the early 2000s.

The Iron Dome system has rendered rockets so ineffective that Hamas and its allies have, in recent days, been attempting more-creative ways of attacking Israel.

Here's why this is interesting. The effectiveness of Iron Dome has been much discussed in the technical press recently, and with a very different emphasis. Five days ago, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, John Mecklin called Iron Dome "the public relations weapon," because it was always touted during battles for results that did not stand up on later inspection.

An NPR segment on July 9 quoted the same technical expert, Ted Postol of MIT, featured in the other stories and was similarly cautionary.

Part of Ted Postol's exchange with NPR's Robert Siegel:

POSTOL: We can tell, for sure, from video images and even photographs that the Iron Dome system is not working very well at all. It - my guess is maybe 5 percent of the time - could be even lower.

SIEGEL: As I understand it, for it to work it actually has to hit an oncoming rocket head on.

POSTOL: That's correct. And when you look - what you can do in the daytime - you can see the smoky contrail of each Iron Dome interceptor, and you can see the Iron Domes trying to intercept the artillery rockets side on and from behind. In those geometries, the Iron Dome has no chance, for all practical purposes, of destroying the artillery rocket.

SIEGEL: By way of contrast, when the Israeli Air Force strikes at targets in Gaza, is the weaponry substantially more accurate than these rockets?

POSTOL: When you're talking about an airstrike from an aircraft, especially with the very, very highly trained pilots Israelis have and, of course, the very advanced equipment that they're using, you're talking about precisions of tens of meters - very, very high precision.

***

Why such a difference in emphasis?

One possibility is the Post has new information that offsets this raft of skeptical analyses, even though it doesn't mention any of these critiques. If so, that will be very interesting in technical and military terms.

Another possibility is that when we eventually know what happened in these missile exchanges (and of course I hope no one on either side dies in any further attacks) , this story, and its lead-the-paper play in the Post today, may seem to be another illustration of Mecklin's hypothesis: that militaries hype the performance of high-tech systems during the heat of battle, and by the time the real results are in the press is onto something else.

I don't know which is the case, though I will say that there is a very, very long track record of the pattern Mecklin describes. And here is an intriguing journalistic detail that could be either insignificant, or a clue:

The "Highly Effective Missile Defense" story has the featured, top-of-the-news position in this morning's print paper. Yet a few hours later on the WashingtonPost.com web site, there is no mention of it whatsoever on the home page. No link, no summary, no "see also," no "in other headlines." This is unusual enough—a story that leads the paper being nonexistent on the home page—that I saved a PDF of that page to be sure I wasn't misreading it.

I called the Post this afternoon to ask if the story's absence from the home page was mere happenstance, or if for some reason the paper was distancing itself from it. The person I was eventually transferred to, a woman on the media relations team, said she understood the question and would get back to me. I'll update this when I hear more.

Update Someone who asks to be identified as a Washington Post spokesperson sends this reply:

The story you are referencing (Israel’s ‘Dome’ changes the fight) was featured in the lead position on The Washington Post’s homepage yesterday. The homepage has since been updated with the latest news.

So perhaps I just didn't see it in time, although I can't help noticing that many other stories from today's print-paper front page are, unlike this one, still featured online. I appreciate the clarification, and we'll see how the Iron Dome story unfolds.

Portion of the cover of Erica Jong's 1973 book Fear of Flying, which is linguistically but not conceptually related to the topics discussed here.

Last night I mentioned the disconnect between things that are frightening, from sharks to airline flights, and things that are likely actually to do us harm. Several reactions worth noting:

1) From a reader who understood the illustration I deliberately left out, to see if anyone would notice. Of course that illustration is terrorismand America's fearful response to it.

As academics Ian Lustick and John Mueller have argued for years, along with Benjamin Friedman (formerly of MIT, now of Cato) and mere journalists, the fear of terrorist attacks, and the responses provoked by the attacks of 2001, have done far more damage to the country than even those original, devastating blows. Many more Americans died in the wholly needless Iraq war than were killed on 9/11; the multi-trillion-dollar cost of the war eclipses any domestic budgetary folly; the damage to civil liberties and American honor internationally has been profound; and so on. All this was all born of fear, often cynically inflamed, not realistic assessment of danger.

I suffer from panic disorder and agoraphobia, both of which have put a bit of a damper on my love of aviation (I wrote about the clash of those two aspects in an Air & Space article last year). But I'm also an aeronautical engineer.

The point I'd like to make is that, even with in-depth knowledge of the systems and structure of aircraft and aviation, fear can manipulate how we observe the world around us and skew how we interpret our senses.

During my first panic attack (on board a flight from LAX), my brain invented half a dozen explanations for why I was suddenly vertiginous and fighting to breathe. Some of those explanations were medical, but most were bizarre inventions about the cabin pressure supply lines being blocked or the aft pressure bulkhead succumbing to cracks. None of these were plausible from an engineering standpoint, but the bond between my fear at that moment and the act of flying on a commercial airline was forged so well that even now (a decade later), I still can't board a commercial flight.

So while I agree that writers tend to play on the public's unfounded fears about flying, we shouldn't discount the ways that fear can warp how we view, and subsequently recount, our experiences. Ultimately, I think it's an editor's duty to balance a writer's artistic license and honest belief in the experiences he or she felt with the publication's integrity and adherence to verifiable facts. I can only hope that my editor and I toed that line better than the NY Times.

Of course Mr. Davis is right. Our emotions and fears are beyond rational control. That's why we call them "emotions." And his Air & Space article is very good, including its climax when a pilot-colleague helps him escape his panic attacks with a comforting ride in a small airplane.

As I read Jeremy Davis's article, I naturally thought of Scott Stossel's memorable cover story for our magazine, drawn from his memorable book. All of these are precisely about the logical mind's inability to contain pre-logical fears. That is a big enough problem when it affects individuals. It's something else—and something that should be easier to recognize and curb—when it affects whole institutions, from journalism to national government. I know that the "should" shows me to be a quaint meliorist.

3) Back to cars. From another reader:

I liked the note re being scared in a normal car ride. I have often given a little monologue that goes something like this.

Imagine for a moment that the personal automobile had never been invented. We are all riding around in trains, trolleys, busses, etc.

Now, along comes an inventor who invents the personal automobile. He lobbies the U.S. Senate to get the government to build roads. They have a hearing. At some point, we get the following interchange.

Senator: So, how fast will these "cars" go?
Inventor: Oh, maybe 70 or 80 mph.
Senator: And, how are you going to keep them from running into each other?
Inventor: We're going to paint lines on the road.

We would still be riding in busses.

4) On to the planet as a whole.

I realize that this question is more profound than the questions related to air safety, though I've had that same thought many times myself while barreling down the highway.

I also would apply it to the distinction between the Cold War [with its dangerous nuclear standoffs] versus the Global War on Terror with its [fear-inducing] apocalyptic imagery in the messianic sense (and that goes for the jihadists as well as our own homegrown evangelicals who are Rapture Ready.

Is that the core conundrum facing humanity when it comes to global warming as the driver of catastrophic climate change? Is there ANY real world experience that would shift the "fear" of an ecological disaster on a global scale into a universal acknowledgment of the clear and present "danger"?

This post follows one a few hours ago about the Heartbleed security failure, and for safety's sake it repeats information I have added to that post as an update.

Point 1: If you would like to test to see whether a site is exposed to the loophole created (over the past two years) by the OpenSSL bug, you can go here and enter the URL you are concerned about. (This tip via Bruce Schneier.) As explained in the FAQ, the test sometimes delivers "false positives" for vulnerability -- that is, it may report problems with a site that actually is OK, or that is in the middle of taking steps to protect itself. But the site's creator explains why "false negatives" -- OK signals when there actually is a problem -- should be very rare, and especially if you perform the test several times. Update Here is another good test site.

Point 2: If a site tests through as Safe, then it makes sense to change your password there. And all of my email and financial sites are now saying Safe, so the changes I am making there will stick.

But even if a site does not say Safe, the people I have asked say that it still makes sense to change -- even though you'll need to change again when the SSL for that site is fully repaired.

Reasoning: If you change it now, it's possible that a still-active hacker will capture info today. But if you don't change it now, anything exploited in the past two years is vulnerable. Also, many sites that are not yet fully protected are on higher alert than they would have been before this news, so hackers may have a tougher time in the new environment than when this was an unknown-unknown.

[Please see important UPDATE in a newer post, and repeated at the bottom of this post.] Most flaps about scary new Internet bugs are just typical scary Internet flaps. This latest one, the Heartbleed bug, I am taking seriously. Potentially it means that username/ password combos for the sites everyone considered secure have in fact been hacked and stolen.

Update: Just this second, I see that Bruce Schneier has declared the bug "catastrophic." Consider yourself warned. Schneier adds:"On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11." He has no track record as an alarmist.

Simplest way to understand the problem: one of the protocols that many sites use to protect their own security, in an implementation known as OpenSSL (for Secure Socket Layers), itself has a previously unknown bug. That bug, in place for the past two years, could in theory allow an attacker to harvest large amounts of name/password combos plus other info from sites believed to be perfectly safe. Because exploitation of the bug would have left no trace, no one (except a potential hacker) yet knows how many names have been taken, or from where.

A patched OpenSSL version exists and is being deployed. Until then, what should you do? Here's a five-point checklist, followed by explanations.

Change the passwords for the handful of sites that really matter to you. I'll explain how you can do this in a total of ten minutes or less. This probably isn't necessary, but just in case...

Do not ever use the same password at two sites that matter to you. Ever. Heartbleed or not, this lowers the security level of any site with that password to the level of the sleaziest and least-secure site where you've ever used it.

Use a password manager, which can generate an unlimited set of unique, "difficult" passwords and remember them for you.

Read what happened in our family three years ago, when one of our Gmail accounts was taken over by someone in Africa, if you would like a real-world demonstration of why you should take these warnings seriously. It's from an article called "Hacked."

That's the action plan. Now the details.

What I am personally doing about Heartbleed, and why.

- I am changing my password for a handful of "important" sites. My finance-related sites: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgage-payment, investment accounts. The email accounts I actually use, three of them in total and all Gmail-based. Plus all social-media accounts. Even though on most of these accounts I am dormant rather than active, I'd rather not have someone take over the account and cause problems in that way. (UPDATE: In response to questions, you would need to do this again once the OpenSSL patch has been distributed or the sites have in other ways confirmed their safety. Nonetheless it seems worth doing even now, even given the possibility that a site is still vulnerable and could have new info intercepted as you're changing it, because otherwise you're exposed to any info collected over the past two years.)

- I am abiding by the watchword of never using the same password on two accounts that matter. Whoever is in charge of security at, say, HottestCheerleadersPlusCheapMedicineFromThailand.com (not an actual site I have visited) might not know how to protect against hacks, or might even dishonestly sell its user info to hackers. They could then blindly try the combos elsewhere.

- I am making all this easy on myself by using a password manager. The one I have used and liked for several years is LastPass, which was also the top choice in this recent PC Mag review. You can read reviews of a wide range of alternatives here and here. The idea behind all of them is that they store a vast range of passwords you could not possibly remember yourself; they automatically fill them in for your sites; and they have a range of very tough security measures to protect this precious central vault. In well under 1 minute per site, I can have Last Pass generate a new, "difficult," never-before-used password for important sites -- let's say u!YKhtAs7xQA , though that's not a real one -- and set my systems up to use that automatically.

For now I'm not getting into the conceptual question of whether one centralized password trove is theoretically more vulnerable than the "distributed" approach of trying to manage this all on your own. In reality, I'm convinced that it's better to use a password manager, and safer than the alternative of trying to keep track of a whole list of passwords on your own. (For instance, you can read Last Pass's explanation of how it does encryption right on each user's computer, not at the central site, so that even someone who got the main controls wouldn't know your passwords.) The only password I keep in my mind is a very long password for Last Pass itself. It's so long that it could never be cracked by brute force, much as no one will win Warren Buffett's billion-dollar bet on the NCAA tournament. But it's very easy for me to remember, because it's a long passage I can reel off by heart.

-- I am using two-step sign-in processes for every system that allows them, and you should too. Gmail does this, and in fact pioneered this as a free feature for mass, non-commercial users. Last Pass also does so. How this works: In certain circumstances, logging in requires not simply your password but an extra, real-time code that is sent to or generated by your mobile phone or other device. What it means: For all practical purposes, someone cannot take over your account from afar. Since so many destructive scams and hacks are carried out remotely -- from Russia, China, West Africa, Israel, the Stans, you name it -- this is the easiest possible protection you can take against a very broad category of attack.

Two-step systems can be mildly inconvenient, but a lot of that has been buffed away. For instance, you can set Gmail so that it doesn't need the second password as long as you are using your own computer or phone. For more details, see this and this.

More as the story develops. The point for now: none of us can do anything about larger architectural questions of security, surveillance, vulnerability, and so on for the Internet. But along the spectrum of what that architecture makes possible, we can make ourselves less rather than more vulnerable. These steps will help.

Update: Via Bruce Schneier, it is very much worth checking out this test site, to see whether a site you deal with frequently has been repaired to avoid the SSL bug. For instance, here -- fortunately -- is what you would see for the Atlantic's site:

In theory, changing a password on a not-yet-fixed site could create new vulnerability, if a hacker has just decided to start watching it today. In practice, most of the people I have checked with say it's worth doing, because otherwise you're exposed to anything captured within the past two years. Then, when a site becomes safe -- as shown above -- it certainly makes sense to change the password. For further explanation, see this follow-on post.

Ari Ofsevit, of the Boston area, sent out a Tweet this afternoon saying "If you're flying in to Boston right now, uh, you aren't." It included the image above, from Flight Aware.

WTF? The answer is that Air Force One, bearing POTUS, was at Boston's Logan Airport, so other planes were not allowed to operate there.

It's always exciting to hear, on the normal Air Traffic Control frequency, calls involving AF1. "November Five Sierra Romeo, climb and maintain six thousand feet." "Climbing six thousand, Five Sierra Romeo." "Air Force One, contact Atlanta Center on one-two-two point three." "Atlanta Center, one-two-two point three, Air Force One." But the idea that the plane should paralyze normal airport operations by its mere existence is an extension of security theater that comes across as Caesarian grandiosity, no matter who occupies the White House. (I will always remember being at the Wright Brothers centennial at Kitty Hawk NC, in 2003, when suddenly AF1, bearing one-time National Guard pilot George W. Bush, arrived, and a Praetorian guard of security officials put the whole area under its control.) As Ofsevit said in a follow-up note:

Watching POTUS fly in to Boston today (and listening in on LiveATC) I decided that it is quite silly anymore that we shut down the airport for AF1. Airports are just about as secure as it gets, and air traffic control is run in such a manner that there hasn't been a plane-to-plane collision in the US in decades. [JF note: For a riveting account of the most dramatic such collision, one between a TWA and a United flight over the Grand Canyon back in 1956, check out this.] Are we admitting that ATC is [fallible], since we ground everyone during presidential visits? Or is this a holdover from earlier days?

I understand, say, keeping planes off the active runway and taxiway when AF1 is landing as a precaution. But keeping everyone at the gate until the president not only lands and taxis, but until his motorcade has left the airport? Does it make any sense?

Once the plane is parked—usually on a section of airfield away from runways, taxiways and ramps, couldn't other planes push back and move towards the runways, and couldn't you land planes which have been circling?

I think this is security theater at its finest, but maybe there's an aviation or security answer beyond that. Is there?

On the Let's Be Reasonable side: American presidents are under a constant barrage of threats; Obama is under a special threat barrage of his own; it matters, and is a kind of miracle, that the violence against political figures that so grossly distorted the 1960s has not recurred. Thank you, Secret Service.

But -- at an airport? Already the distillation of America's security state? To imagine that one of the other airliners conducting normal operations might constitute a threat would require: knowing in advance when Air Force One was about to arrive, which is usually announced at the last minute; knowing in advance which airline crews would be on which planes to carry out a threat, also subject to last-minute change; somehow getting something on those planes that might be dangerous; knowing exactly where those airplanes would be, on the airport's runways, taxiways, and gates, at the moment Air Force One was parked and vulnerable; disregarding ATC instructions so as somehow to impinge on Air Force One's space; and so on. Anything could happen, but ...

In Washington DC, presidential "ground movements" -- the motorcades with all the police-motorcycle forerunners and the rest of the entourage -- have been worked out to paralyze the city as little as possible. Maybe we could apply that logic to airports too? Given that they are already so much more thoroughly controlled than our roads? Just a thought.

I won't drag this out indefinitely. (On the other hand, think about it: You may be saying to yourself, Okay, enough already, let this topic go, it's getting tedious. Meanwhile, Sgt. Remsburg and tens of thousands of other people will wake up every single morning for the rest of their lives and cope with the consequences of our open-ended wars.) Previously here and here.

But here is another message from a person now in uniform:

Thanks for writing about Cory Remsburg. I had no idea that it had happened until I had read your article, so I popped over to YouTube to see what I had missed. I'm an active duty service member who, thankfully, has only had to deploy once (so far), and my reaction to it pretty much mirrors yours and probably most of your readers. I won't go into detail how frustrating it was to watch, but I think it put on display a larger cultural problem.

At some point, during the last 12 years and some change the United States has been doing combat deployments, the people who deploy and the reasons for deploying them have become inseparable. People who deploy are undoubtedly brave (well, usually) and have to do absolutely shitty things to varying degrees, and deserve accolades for that.

The reasons behind the deployment are not always so praise-worthy, but to criticize the mission is seen as criticizing the *people*, taking away from what they gave up. I think the best recent example for this is Lone Survivor, where people saw that the movie maybe was critical of Operation Red Wings and lashed out against it, insisting that the *reason* behind the mission didn't matter, what mattered was how brave the SOCOM troops were. To criticize the reason why they were, and why multiple operators lost their lives, is to take away from their sacrifice.

That's what happened when SFC Remsburg was introduced. Why was he deployed ten times? Who the hell cares! What matters is that he was brave, and he volunteered his service, and his sacrifice was noble. To question why he was sent, if it really was necessary for him to get blown up, is to question his sacrifice, which can not be tolerated.

I'm a young guy, and can't really say if there's precedence for this sort of mentality in previous conflicts, but the best I can hope for is that when the conflict is over people will look back on it and say, "Yea, that was kind of screwed up."

And one more reader note about the same Congress that so earnestly applauded Remsburg:

The Cory Remsburg story seems like one more instance where we have lost our collective spirit to solve problems and take care of each other. As a previous emailer pointed out—10 tours of duty? It is no wonder these young men and women are returning home with serious problems.

I am the parent of 2 children in their 20's that have been spared this horror, and I know it is patently unfair, and in the long term, detrimental to who we are as a country. The recent passage of the Farm Bill which cut food stamps to millions is another example of disregarding our responsibilities to our fellow Americans.

To round it out and put it in context, a trenchant article by a Marine Corps adviser in Afghanistan on why our entire effort there is likely to come to nothing.